The scene from Dickens's Tavistock House Twelfth Night production of
"The Frozen Deep" on the stage of "The Smallest Theatre in the
World" is from The Illustrated London News for 17 January 1857,
pages 51-52. "Wardour [played by Dickens] in rags, wild as
a maniac, rushes into the cave [on the Newfoundland coast]. He
claims food and drink, part of which he takes, and carefully
preserves the rest in a wallet. Crayford at last recognises
him--endeavours to seize him--but the madman dashes away, soon
to return, with poor exhausted Aldersley in his arms. He had
become the preserver of the man whom he had seduced to the
most desolate spots on the Arctic snows for the purpose of
destroying. He makes full reparation for his intended crime; and, ere
his death [pictured here], blesses the union of Clara
Burnham and Frank Aldersley. The reader will perceive
that Mr. Charles Dickens had in such a character as this a part that
required the consummate acting of a well-practised performer" (p.
52).

In a subsequent performance, Dickens was praised by Queen
Victoria for his acting skills. When the play was taken on the road,
one of the professional actresses engaged to replaced members of
Dickens's family was young Ellen Ternan, probably his mistress and
the prototype of Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities and
Estella in Great Expectations. Certainly Wardour's rescuing
his rival from the Arctic elements is reflected in Sydney Carton's
substituting himself for Charles Darnay as the guillotine's victim at
the conclusion of A Tale of Two Cities in 1859.

Other pieces in which Dickens, Lemon, Augustus Egg, and Miss
Hogarth appeared at the time were Inchbald's farce "Animal
Magnetism," and Buckstone's farce "Uncle John."